


Hard to Tell, Have to Ask

by ladivvinatravestia



Series: 30 - 50 Feral Himbos [1]
Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: 30 - 50 feral himbos, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Background Relationships, Celebrity culture, M/M, everyone is poly because witchers, neurodivergence, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:53:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27585695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladivvinatravestia/pseuds/ladivvinatravestia
Summary: Jaskier gets carded in a liquor store, under unusual circumstances.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Series: 30 - 50 Feral Himbos [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1756468
Comments: 8
Kudos: 87





	Hard to Tell, Have to Ask

**Author's Note:**

> I didn’t know how to tag for this, but Jaskier is doing the thing where when he sees his partner about to have a negative emotional experience, he jumps in to try to mediate the situation so his partner won’t have the negative emotional experience, presumably because he’s had parental and/or romantic relationships in the past where the other person blamed him if he failed to mediate the situation before they lost their cool. Geralt doesn’t notice he’s doing it, doesn’t expect him to do it, and has such terrible self-esteem he’d probably be annoyed if he figured out it was going on (“You don’t need to do that for _me_.”). Also, Jaskier’s birth name is used a couple times.

Jaskier traipses around after Geralt in the liquor store, trying not to get bored. He’d exhausted the store’s selection of interesting ciders and craft beers within the first ten minutes, but Geralt is still working his way methodically through some kind of list that Crach sent him.

“What’s this for, again?” he asks Geralt.

His phone vibrates and he checks it to see he’s received a message from Yen.

“Where ARE you guys?” it reads. It’s followed by a picture of Yen, Triss, and Priscilla making duck lips and peace signs for the camera.

“Geralt’s reading every single bottle of booze in the store,” Jaskier responds.

“Is this for that terrible Bifrost drink Crach wants to mix?” Yen asks.

“I think so?” replies Jaskier, and follows up with a picture of Geralt holding up a bottle of peppermint schnapps next to his phone and scowling at them. He notices the cashier scowling at him and lowers his phone so the cashier can’t see him using it.

“Tell him the brand doesn’t matter because it’s all going in a five gallon paint pail with everyone else’s contributions when he gets here,” says Yen.

Jaskier starts to try to tell Geralt exactly that, when he gets another message from Triss, a picture of Yen sitting on Crach’s lap on the bumper of his SUV, the houseboat pier in the background. She’s wearing a hat that says, “Women want me; fish fear me.”

“Also, tell Geralt that if he doesn’t hurry up, his girlfriend is breaking up with him for the sexy Viking,” she says.

Jaskier rolls his eyes and shows the picture to Geralt.

Finally, Geralt is satisfied he’s chosen the exact right liquors in the exact right volumes specified on Crach’s list and they head to the cash register. They’d previously agreed that Jaskier would pay for the food and Geralt would buy the booze, so Jaskier settles for hanging back and silently daring the cashier to say - or even _think_ \- one judgmental thing about an indigenous guy buying so much alcohol, but she doesn’t.

Out in the parking lot, Jaskier hangs back once more as Geralt empties out the coolers to repackage them more efficiently, chilling the booze that needs to be chilled, and making sure the food that needs to stay cold stays cold. They’ve been together long enough, travelled together, lived together, to dispense with any pretence that Jaskier is capable of packing anything efficiently. Geralt has retreated into complete silence and Jaskier starts to worry about how he’s going to deal with a ten-day houseboat trip in close quarters with a bunch of people he doesn’t even know that well, while trying to pretend he’s only dating one member of his polycule. Sure, he’s an adult and made that decision for himself, and Jaskier needs to work on not trying to make himself responsible for other people’s emotional well-being - but if Jaskier worries about Geralt, he doesn’t have to think about how well _he_ is going to deal with a ten-day houseboat trip in close quarters with a bunch of people he doesn’t even know that well, while trying to pretend he is not dating any of the members of his polycule. He foresees a lot of homophobic jokes being made at his expense in his future.

“Fuck,” says Geralt.

It startles Jaskier to immediate attentiveness. How can he fix whatever has gone wrong? “What is it?”

“Not enough ice,” says Geralt.

Jaskier relaxes. This is very easily fixed. “Okay, you just keep working on -“ Jaskier waves his hand at the food, alcohol, coolers, and camping gear not unloaded in the parking lot “- all this, and I’ll go get more. How many bags? Two? Three?”

Geralt pauses so long that Jaskier thinks he might not say anything, then holds up three fingers.

“Back in a flash, okay?” he says, then takes back off across the parking lot toward the liquor store. 

The ice is stored in a cooler in the foyer of the liquor store, so Jaskier grabs the bags on the way in to the store, goes in the “out” door, and puts them in the bagging area before jumping the turnstile to stand in front of the cashier. She definitely recognizes him from a couple minutes ago, which he thinks is a good thing until she says,

“Can I see your ID, please?”

Jaskier gapes at her.

“I’m buying bags of ice,” he says.

She shrugs, not very apologetically, and points to the poster behind the till, which says, “Hard to Tell; Have to Ask.” 

“I didn’t even go past where any of the booze is,” Jaskier protests.

“Store policy,” says the cashier.

Jaskier opens and closes his mouth a few times. “You didn’t ask _him_ for ID,” he says, pointing out at Geralt in the parking lot.

“Oh, we ID everyone under 40,” the cashier says dismissively.

“He’s _thirty-three_.”

“Oh but he has grey hair though,” shrugs the cashier.

Jaskier takes a deep breath. At some point in the future, some parts of this story may be funny, but Geralt is sensitive enough about his appearance (and for no good reason), nobody is ever allowed to learn about this part of the exchange.

“I can’t believe you want me to show you ID to buy a couple bags of ice,” Jaskier mutters.

There’s nobody else in the store, but the cashier is starting to tap her fingers like he’s wasting her time. Fine. He reaches into his messenger back and pulls out - not his wallet with his State ID, but his passport. If she wants to be Extra, he can be Extra too.

He slides it across the cash desk and she flicks it open, disinterested.

She pauses.

It’s a much longer pause than should be warranted by the situation.

“This is _his_ passport,” she tells Jaskier, in the same bored voice, and cocks her head in the direction of Geralt in the parking lot.

“Oh, for _fuck’s_ sake,” swears Jaskier.

She turns the passport around and, sure enough, it’s Geralt’s. Which means they have been walking around with each other’s passports since the last time they crossed the border together, at least two months ago. And she’s still not showing any signs of selling him the ice without pictorial evidence that he’s over twenty-one.

Sighing, he pulls his wallet out of his messenger bag and plunks it down on the counter, open to show his State ID. The cashier bends over to look at it, running her finger over the line with his birthdate and then making a production of checking on a calculator that he’s over twenty-one.

Then she looks at his name, frowns, and looks back up at his face. “Julian Pankratz,” she says, “you look kinda familiar, do I know you from somewhere?”

Double fuck. “Oh, you know, my parents have some property near here,” he hedges, hoping to misdirect her.

“No, no, I just moved here this spring,” she says, starting to ring up the three bags of ice. Jaskier takes his wallet back and checks it. Of course he has no cash, there’s no way to make this faster. “Did we go to school together somewhere?”

“Must’ve been it, yeah,” he agrees, even though it’s almost definitely not true.

“Oooohhhh, no, wait a minute, I have it!” the cashier exclaims, doing a little dance of victory. Jaskier looks around the shop, but there still aren’t any other customers to save him from this. “You’re that guy from _Callonetta_!”

And then she starts singing, quite well, actually,

“Though my carriage be but careless,  
Though my looks be of the sternest,  
yet my passions be compareless -“

It is, of course, the song that inexplicably rocketed his and Priscilla’s jokey bardcore garage band to the peaks of internet popularity and got them a record deal, but Jaskier _really_ doesn’t want to have to deal with any of that right now. He wouldn’t even on a good day, but after the cashier was so much of a rules lawyer about his age -

“Never heard of it,” he lies, and taps his card against the card reader.

“No! Really? Oh emm gee, you look totally like him! Here, let me find the video for you,” says the cashier, and pulls out her phone.

“Sorry, but my boyfriend is looking kind of impatient out there,” Jaskier lies again, shoving all of his ID back into his messenger bag and loading the bags of ice into his hands. His hands are shaking a bit - he’s a little nervous about lying but even more nervous about encountering an apparent fan in the wild. So far all of his brushes with celebrity culture have been heavily mediated by the handlers assigned to him and Priscilla by the record label.

He goes through the turnstile and backs out the door so he won’t knock the bags of ice out of his hands. As he’s leaving, the cashier shouts after him,

“Actually never mind, they’re not that good a band.”

_Well, fuck you, too_ , he thinks, and makes a beeline for Geralt and the truck.

When he gets there, Geralt is, in fact, looking a bit impatient - not, Jaskier knows, with him, but just with the situation. He clearly has everything rearranged and is just waiting for the ice before he can get things re-packed and back into the truck.

“Trouble?” Geralt asks him.

He hands the ice over. “No. Yes. I -“ It’s scorching hot out, with the sunlight reflecting back from the pavement and off the sides of the other vehicles in the lot. The two scrawny trees planted in the name of landscaping give off no shade whatsoever. Maybe all of this will seem like less of a big deal if Jaskier just goes and takes a big drink of water and sits down for a bit. “I’m just going to sit in the truck.”

“Okay,” says Geralt.

Jaskier gets into the passenger seat of the truck. It’s approximately a thousand degrees in there, and his water is closer in temperature to tea, but he gulps a bunch of it down anyways and then closes his eyes. It’s so bright out that closing his eyes only brings the light level down to an orange glow, but between that and the screaming hot temperature it’s enough to temporarily silence all the other things trying to race through his brain.

He’s even managed to zone out a bit when he hears Geralt getting in the driver’s side of the truck, but he keeps his eyes closed. Then Geralt puts the key in the ignition, and the truck’s big V8 engine roars to life, and along with it, the air conditioning, which thank _fuck_ is currently working. Jaskier keeps his eyes closed as Geralt pulls the truck out of the parking lot and back out onto the freeway. He’s just starting to think about opening his eyes again and trying to explain everything that happened when Geralt reaches over and takes his hand. He smiles without opening his eyes, and squeezes Geralt’s hand instead. Geralt squeezes back.

“So, we have each other’s passports,” Jaskier begins.

**Author's Note:**

> The song that accidentally rocketed Jaskier and Priscilla to fame is “Though My Carriage Be But Careless”, author unknown, set to music by Thomas Weelkes in 1608. The full text is:
> 
> Though my carriage be but careless,  
> though my looks be of the sternest,  
> yet my passions be compareless,  
> when I love, I love in earnest.
> 
> No, my wits are not so wild  
> but a gentle soul may yoke me,  
> nor my heart so hard compiled  
> but it melts, if love provoke me.


End file.
